With our team Carbon Motion, we are working for Avantium, a company that creates new chemical technologies, aiming to contribute to a more sustainable society. Avantium wants us to help them with industrializing their Volta technique, which converts CO2 into a chemical building block. To get a feeling of the company and this technique, you could watch this video: Volta – Avantium. Using the Volta technique, formic acid/formate can be made from CO2. We have seriously investigated the different ways to use this material, for example using formic acid in cosmetics, for fuel and energy storage, or making polymers (plastics). Via interviews with the employees of Avantium and possible stakeholders, we came across several obstacles which need to be tackled before successful industrialization. For example, with every conversion of chemicals, you lose energy so we want to make a circle/chain which is fully sustainable.

We want to help Avantium to make their product most useful and widely applied where it is relevant and logical, by showing them which other companies could benefit from the Volta. We aim to do this by presenting new ideas on how they can collaborate, use, and market their technology in the form of a basic but comprehensive business plan.